As the global economy grows, so too has the advent of companies outsourcing part, or all, of their operations, typically due to costs. With outsourcing, however, comes the concomitant reduction in insight and control by the company of the operation(s) that have been outsourced. This is frequently done in the area of information technology (IT) services. Companies attempt to address these shortcomings with various approaches including: meeting more frequently with the service provider for status updates; dedicating company resources (e.g., personnel) to work physically alongside in the datacenter that the operation(s) is outsourced to; and/or, creating customized software to measure the service provider's progress.
With all of these approaches, come drawbacks. For example, with more frequent meetings, often the company that has outsourced their operation(s) wants even more status and/or deeper insight to the outsourced task(s) than the meetings accord. Allocating company people to work (e.g., monitor, manage, etc.) alongside the working outsource operations is costly. With customized software (e.g., IT Dashboard) developed and defined at the start of the outsourcing engagement often becomes obsolete over the time that the oursourcing is conducted.
Accordingly, a need exists for a solution that addresses at least one of the aforementioned shortcomings in resource outsourcing.